One Step Forward
by justrumbelledearie
Summary: Words won't fix this, but lips might. Set post-'Family Business.'


You step towards him, wearing the white cotton nightdress with the scalloped lace trim, the one that he favors above all others.

You are small and bare-faced and pale in the lamplight, all of your brightly-colored artifice scrubbed away by the rough side of a wet washrag. Dark hair tumbles loose over your shoulders, wet at the temples and wild at the ends. You know he loves the length of it, the sensuous, lovely weight of it, the silken feel of it twined between his restless fingers when he thinks you are asleep and dreaming.

You step towards him—and you realize he hasn't yet healed the earlier laceration from the dagger.

It isn't your place to ask him why.

The shallow gash smiles at you obscenely from beneath the soft curtain of his greying hair: red at the center and pink along the edges—garish, angry, and inflamed.

Perhaps he simply _forgot_ about it during the chaos of the afternoon: everyone shouting out wild theories, practicing heating spells, jostling one another, calling out loudly for seconds and thirds of Granny's warm special _du jour_ and for refills of her bitter-black coffee.

But your husband isn't an absent-minded man.

Perhaps he keeps the cut as a grim momento. A slender, festering reminder of the very real perils of trust and the pain that lovers can so easily inflict. Not to punish you—for with _you_ he is never intentionally cruel—but rather to teach himself even greater caution.

He has his reasons. They are his own.

You have no right to ask.

Yet he says he has forgiven you—_instantaneously,_ it seems.

And so you step towards him and raise yourself up high on tiptoe to kiss the terrible hurt you've made, your lips lingering over the strange, raised texture of the wound, tasting the copper-bright flavor of the open cut, soothing it with the heat of your tongue.

"You know, we don't have to," he says, his arms still heavy at his sides, "After today—after everything…"

"Please—_I want to."_ Your breath is damp against his neck, your voice embarrassingly high-pitched and hopeful. "Please, will you let me—after everything?"

He subsides. His eyes fall shut.

His lips are stretched in a grim, flat line.

Your mouth travels slowly upwards to the hairline behind his right ear, a shrouded, secret place that always makes him shiver. You love to visit this spot when your husband is bent low over his workbench, tinkering and polishing. You love to brush his long, shaggy hair aside, to touch your lips to the base of his skull, to smell his faint sandalwood cologne, and hear him hum his happiness.

He's humming and shivering now; you can feel the slight tremor running through him.

You trace his stubbled jawline with your thumbs, then thread a careful hand through his silver-brown hair. It's his dry lips you want—it's his lips you think about when you're all alone with your racing thoughts. The smooth, dry feel of them and the way—even after all this time—you need to venture forth to draw his hesitant, slippery tongue out.

Every kiss is a fresh adventure.

"We didn't kiss this way—not in my village," he had explained once, early in their courtship, sounding breathless and strange.

And you had held him in your mind's eye then—a simple village boy, very new to kissing, sneaking off to practice it behind the tall haystacks with his dry, sweet, chaste, hesitant lips.

And then a marriage. And then a child. And then a heartbreak.

And then an endless solitude.

You reach hurriedly for the metal fastener on his trousers then, sinking to your bare knees on the thick, woven rug—but he catches you gently by the wrists, unnaturally quick.

"Oh sweetheart, no, not like that. Come here…"

And he is pulling you upright, lifting you onto the soft, unwrinkled, brocade bedspread—tender and cautious and restrained as always—prepared to concentrate, prepared to hold back, prepared to please you—as if one day you might simply stand up and walk off if his lovemaking isn't perfect, isn't beautiful, isn't absolutely _enough._

But tonight isn't for tender restraint.

Tonight isn't for your husband's adoring, attentive hands.

Tonight is for _him,_ and so you roll out from beneath his hips and heavy torso and return to the worshipful task of removing his pressed, wool trousers. Finding the little metal clasp. Working it loose. Carefully lowering the silver zipper—and only _then_ glancing upwards to see his tawny eyes on you, hooded and watchful.

"What, ah—you don't need to do that," he faintly protests, because apparently only in the rainy, isolated Marchlands were people free and easy with their pleasures,

And yet he doesn't stop you when you ease his black trousers and silk undergarments down over his hips, slowly revealing the pale flesh of his thighs, speckled with sparse, dark hair.

Lying thick against his pale belly, curved and twitching amidst the flattened nest of dark curls, he has already begun to swell.

Knowing that he loves to see absolutely _all,_ you raise the white cotton nightdress up over your head and cast it aside.

A candle on the nightstand sparks, sputters, and flares to life.

Sitting back on your heals, you drink in the dear, beloved sight up him: his crumpled, grey collared shirt, his long, disheveled hair, his chest rapidly rising and falling, his parted, dry lips, his crooked teeth, his dark brow deeply creased above the sharp line of his nose.

"Is this because of—ah, God, you don't need to do that," he repeats.

Above you, the small chandelier begins to shake.

"But will you let me?" you ask quietly, bending over the delicate curve of his kneecap, kissing it, then lifting your eyes to see his answer.

"Ah—!" His fingers twist against the bedspread, "You don't have to…"

"But will you let me?" you whisper against the vulnerable, white flesh of his thigh, kissing upwards, moving slowly.

He groans. Shivers. You've reached his hipbone.

"But will you let me?" you ask the soft, coiled hairs at the base of swollen cock, brushing your nose through them, inhaling his familiar, yeasty-warm scent, heating him with your breath, waiting.

And your husband whispers, _"Yes."_


End file.
